May 19, 2008

FT: The man who put a local face on Google

The man who put a local face on Google

The job of running Google’s
largest overseas outpost may be the most sought-after position in
European technology but, when Nikesh Arora was approached about the
role, he was not impressed.

In
2004, Google’s European, Middle Eastern and African operations amounted
to fewer than 400 people, 80 of them crammed into a small office in
London’s Soho. Mr Arora sat in the conference room and told Omid
Kordestani, Google’s worldwide sales boss: “It looks like a great
company but, honestly, these offices do not reflect what I’d expect of
it.”

Most discussions about Google come round sooner or later to
the premises. Like the Googleplex in Mountain View, California,
Google’s London workplace these days is all fresh fruit and Italian
coffee machines. Soft furnishings in primary colours, bunting and the
occasional inflatable tiger make it look more like a kindergarten pre-school than home to a group of high-powered engineers.

Handpicked crowd of powerful friends asked to tap into Zeitgeist

Nikesh
Arora will today trade his stylish offices for a country house hotel in
Watford as he plays host to one of the more unusual corporate
networking events. Google’s Zeitgeist conferences, originally devised
in the US, have evolved into something akin to a one-company Davos,
which book up months in advance.

Over the next two days, a
handpicked crowd of 350 advertisers, broadcasters and politicians from
around Europe, the Middle East and Africa, will listen to 40 speakers
ranging from Mohamed Ibrahim, the African mobile phone entrepreneur, to
Queen Rania of Jordan.

The themes this year range from climate
change to copyright battles. Tomorrow, the most popular users of
YouTube, StarDoll and Metacafe will be on stage with the chief
executives of the three websites to discuss how they might be improved.

The
accomplished networker says he personally called 30 of the speakers to
persuade them to come. They are not there to talk about Google, he
insists. But, in a year in which Google has needed political support
for its Doubleclick acquisition in Europe and has been rehearsing its
arguments against a Microsoft-Yahoo combination, such powerful opinion
formers are increasingly useful friends.

Sprawling
in a red leather chair in one of the building’s more restrained offices
overlooking Victoria station, Mr Arora describes his achievements
largely in property and personnel terms. The nine EMEA offices he
inherited are now 33, he says; he spends a third of his time recruiting
– staff numbers have swelled to 3,400 – and thinking “how do we make
our people happy”?

For Google, he says, this is no cliché. “The
only way we can scale a business which has probably grown faster than
any other business in the world is to make sure we have the right
people and to trust them.”

Another third of his time is spent
with partners and advertisers, discussing products with “local flavour”
to work beyond California. Logic dictates which products are developed
locally, he says, noting that Europe’s mobile telephony strengths have
given it a lead over the US in mobile search and that the Dutch like
their online maps to include bicycle routes.

Mr Arora spends the
rest of his time pursuing longer-term ideas. Top of the list at the
moment is the phenomenon of “video when you want it”, he says. As
people have more freedom to watch programming at different times, he
notes, assumptions about their demographic profile are also having to
change. This opens the possibility of customising video advertising not
just on websites such as Google’s YouTube platform but also over
television set-top boxes.

Already, Mr Arora says, his 11-year-old
daughter “doesn’t understand you have to wait in front of a television
screen for something to happen at 8pm”.

Her approach of setting
the family digital video recorder having researched programmes on
YouTube is a far cry from Mr Arora’s own childhood. Growing up in
India, he and his family would gather at the house of an aunt who had a
TV set. They would arrive before broadcasts started to get a good seat,
then, “from 6pm to 6.30pm, I got educated about how to be a better
farmer” before the Bollywood music programme he was there to see came
on. “That was it. That was entertainment.”

Mr Arora, who has just
turned 40, left India 19 years ago, but he credits his upbringing with
setting him on the path to Google. One of 100,000 students who sat the
same examination in 1985 for 2,000 places in the six best engineering
schools in the country, he still remembers his rank – 1,292. When he
beat 200,000 people to get one of 250 scholarships the following year,
“that’s when I figured out I might be a little smarter than I’d
thought”.

Asked why so many of his generation of Indian engineers
went on to make their careers in the US rather than at home, he points
out that, when he left the Institute of Technology in Varanasi for his
first job at Wipro in India, he was paid just £500 a year.

A year
later, the 21-year-old Mr Arora moved to the US with two suitcases and
$100. “The thing I feel most proud of is that I went to business school
for two years in a culture I didn’t understand but I graduated first.
That to me was a significant achievement because that tells me I can
adapt to different environments,” he says.

An MBA at Northwestern
University took him to jobs as an analyst at Fidelity and Putnam,
covering the booming telecoms industry. By the end of the decade he was
at T-Mobile, where he launched T-motion, a mobile media business,
before becoming chief marketing officer.

Despite his ringside
seat at the TMT boom, Mr Arora claims the only thing he knew about
Google by 2004 was that it had used an unusual Dutch auction process
for its initial public offering.

When interviewed by Google
founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin at the British Museum, however, he
clinched the job after a discussion about machine-based translation
services spurred by five minutes in the gift shop reading about the
Rosetta Stone.

Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, told him
later that his primary role would be to build a sales force. Mr Arora
had no direct sales experience – “but that’s what Google’s about. We
don’t believe everything we are going to do has been done, so it’s hard
for us to hire somebody who’s done everything we want to do”, he says.

Mr
Arora dismisses European handwringing about whether the continent has
the talent to compete with Silicon Valley, adding that every one of his
staff would give their US colleagues a run for their money. “Clearly
you don’t have a Google [in Europe] but show me how many Googles exist
in the world,” he says.

Europe may have been fertile recruiting
ground but it has also been the place where Google has run into the
most resistance over copyright and privacy issues. Mr Arora plays down
its battles in Brussels as “discussions”, saying that Europe’s multiple
states will rarely have as consistent a view on such issues as the US.

The
debates are very different in other regions under his wing. The Arab
world, eastern Europe and Africa will account for two-thirds of the
world’s new internet users over the next decade, Mr Arora estimates,
but they have little digital infrastructure at present.

Google’s
efforts to build a culture of internet use in such markets has included
its giving tailored, local-language versions of its Google Apps
applications to education ministries in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. “You
have access to the internet, you get access to information and it’s
positive for economies, it’s positive for citizens,” he says.

Self-interest
also plays a role, however. “We do it right and, in five, six or seven
years, we’ll be working towards the same advertising benefits that we
have in the developed world,” he says.

While analysts and
bloggers hang on every word uttered by Google’s founders and chief
executive, it is harder for outsiders to point to Google initiatives
that have Mr Arora’s name on them. Asked about his achievements,
though, he is clear: just above half of Google’s revenues now come from
outside the US, he says, compared with one-third when he joined. Google
does not break out regional sales but Europe is the largest of its
international hubs.

“When I came here four years ago, the
biggest concern partners had was they felt they had to go to California
to do anything,” he says. Today, as telecoms companies, advertisers or
governments beat a path to the multicoloured offices in Victoria and
beyond, “we have put a local face on Google”.